“I shall go to the German Kaiser [to say] ‘Let our people go,’ ” decided Herzl, and resolved to base his state on “this great, strong, moral, splendidly governed, tightly organized Germany. Through Zionism, it will again become possible for Jews to love this Germany.”
WILHELM: THE PARASITES OF MY EMPIRE
The Kaiser was an unlikely Jewish champion. When he heard that Jews were settling in Argentina, he said, “Oh if only we could send ours there too,” and hearing about Herzl’s Zionism, he wrote, “I’m very much in favour of the Mauschels going to Palestine. The sooner they clear off the better!” Although he regularly met Jewish industrialists in Germany, and became friends with the Jewish shipowner Albert Ballin, he was at heart an anti-Semite who ranted against the poisonous hydra of Jewish capitalism. Jews were the “parasites of my empire” who he believed were “twisting and corrupting” Germany. Years later, as a deposed monarch, he would propose mass extermination of the Jews using gas. Yet Herzl sensed that “the anti-Semites are becoming our most reliable friends.”
Herzl had to penetrate the Kaiser’s court. First he managed to meet the Kaiser’s influential uncle, Grand Duke Friedrich of Baden, who was interested in a scheme to find the Ark of the Covenant. Baden wrote to his nephew, who in turn asked Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, to report on the Zionist plan. Eulenburg, the Kaiser’s best friend, ambassador to Vienna and political mastermind, was “fascinated” by Herzl’s pitch: Zionism was a way to extend German power. The Kaiser agreed that “the energy, creativity and efficiency of the tribe of Shem would be diverted to worthier goals than the sucking dry of Christians.” Wilhelm, like most of the ruling class of that time, believed that the Jews possessed a mystical power over the workings of the world:
Our dear God knows even better than we do that the Jews killed Our Saviour and he punished them accordingly. It shouldn’t be forgotten that, considering the immense and extremely dangerous power which International Jewish capital represents, it would be a huge advantage to Germany if the Hebrews looked up to it in gratitude.
Here was the good news for Herzl: “Everywhere the hydra of the ghastliest anti-Semitism is raising its dreadful head and the terrified Jews are looking around for a protector. Well then, I shall intercede with the Sultan.” Herzl was ecstatic: “Wonderful, wonderful.”
On 11 October 1898, the Kaiser and Kaiserin embarked on the imperial train with a retinue including his foreign minister, twenty courtiers, two doctors and eighty maids, servants and bodyguards. Anxious to impress the world, he had personally designed a special white-grey uniform with a full-length white Crusader-style veil. On 13 October, Herzl, with four Zionist colleagues, set out from Vienna on the Orient Express, packing a wardrobe that included white tie and tails as well as pith helmet and safari suit.
In Istanbul, Wilhelm finally received the Zionist, whom he judged to be “an idealist with an aristocratic mentality, clever, very intelligent with expressive eyes.” The Kaiser said he supported Herzl because “there are usurers at work. If these people went to settle in the colonies, they could be more useful.” Herzl protested at this calumny. The Kaiser inquired what he should ask the sultan for. “A chartered company under German protection,” replied Herzl. The Kaiser invited Herzl to meet him in Jerusalem.
Herzl was impressed. The Hohenzollern personified imperial power with “his great sea blue eyes, his fine serious face, frank, genial and yet bold,” but the reality was different. Wilhelm was certainly intelligent, knowledgeable and energetic, but he was also so restless and inconsistent that even Eulenburg feared he was mentally ill. After sacking Prince Bismarck as chancellor, he took control of German politics, but he was too unstable to sustain it. His personal diplomacy was disastrous; his written notes to his ministers were so outrageous that they had to be locked in a safe; his alarmingly articulate speeches, in which he encouraged his troops to shoot German workers or to massacre enemies like Huns, were embarrassing.b Already by 1898, Wilhelm was regarded as half-buffoon, half-warmonger.
Nonetheless he proposed the Zionist plan to Abdul-Hamid. The sultan rejected it firmly, telling his daughter, “The Jews may spare their millions. When my empire is divided, perhaps they will get Palestine for nothing. But only our corpse can be divided.” Meanwhile Wilhelm, dazzled by the vigour of Islam, lost interest in Herzl.1
At 3 p.m. on 29 October 1898, the Kaiser rode through a breach specially opened in the wall next to the Jaffa Gate and entered Jerusalem on a white charger.
THE KAISER AND HERZL:
THE LAST CRUSADER AND THE FIRST ZIONIST
The Kaiser sported the white uniform with the full-length gold-threaded burnous veil sparkling in the sunlight, flowing from a spiked helmet surmounted with a burnished golden eagle, escorted by a cavalcade of giant Prussian hussars in steel helmets waving Crusader-style banners and the Sultan’s lancers in red waistcoats, blue pantaloons and green turbans and armed with lances. The Kaiserin, in a patterned silk dress with a sash and a straw hat, followed on behind him in a carriage with her two ladies-in-waiting.
Herzl watched the Kaiser’s performance from a hotel filled with German officers. The Kaiser had grasped that Jerusalem was the ideal stage on which to advertise his newly minted empire, but not everyone was impressed: the Dowager Russian Empress thought his performance “revolting, perfectly ridiculous, disgusting!” The Kaiser was the first head of state to appoint an official photographer for a state visit. The Crusader uniform and the pack of photographers revealed what Eulenburg called the Kaiser’s “two totally different natures—the knightly, reminiscent of the finest days of the Middle Ages, and the modern.”
The crowds, reported the New York Times, were “dressed in holiday clothes, the city men in white turbans, gaily striped tunics, the wives of Turkish army officers in gorgeous silken milayes, the well-to-do peasants in flowing kaftans of flaming red,” while Bedouin on fine steeds “wore large clumsy red boots, a leather girdle over a tunic filled with an arsenal of small arms” and a keffiyeh. Their sheikhs carried spears with a burst of ostrich feathers around the blade.
At the Jewish triumphal arch, the chief Sephardic rabbi, a bearded nonagenarian in white kaftan and blue turban, and his Ashkenazi counterpart presented Wilhelm with a copy of the Torah, and he was welcomed by the mayor, Yasin al-Khalidi, in a royal purple cloak and a gold-encircled turban. Wilhelm dismounted at David’s Tower, and from there he and the empress walked into the city, the crowds cleared for fear of anarchist assassins (Empress Elisabeth of Austria had recently been assassinated). As the patriarchs in the effulgence of their jewel-encrusted regalia showed him the Sepulchre, the Kaiser’s heart was beating “faster and more fervently” as he trod in Jesus’ footsteps.
While Herzl waited for his summons and explored the city, the Kaiser dedicated the Church of the Redeemer with its Romanesque tower, a structure that he had personally designed “with particular care and love.” When he visited the Temple Mount, the Kaiser, another enthusiastic archaeologist, asked the mufti to allow excavations, but the latter politely demurred.
On 2 November, Herzl was finally summoned for his imperial audience—the five Zionists were so nervous that one of them suggested taking bromide. Dressing appropriately in white tie, tails and top hats, they arrived north of the Damascus Gate at the Kaiser’s encampment. This was a luxury Thomas Cook village with 230 tents, which had been transported in 120 carriages, borne by 1,300 horses, served by 100 coachmen, 600 drivers, twelve cooks and sixty waiters, all guarded by an Ottoman regiment. It was, said the tour maestro John Mason Cook, “the largest party gone to Jerusalem since the Crusades. We swept the country of horses and carriages and almost of food.” Punch mocked Wilhelm as “Cook’s Crusader.”
Herzl found the Kaiser posing “in a grey colonial uniform, veiled helmet, brown gloves and holding—oddly enough—a riding crop.” The Zionist approached, “halted and bowed. Wilhelm held out his hand very affably” and then lectured him, declaring, “The land needs water and shade. There is r
oom for all. The idea behind your movement is a healthy one.” When Herzl explained that laying on a water supply was feasible but expensive, the Kaiser replied, “Well, you have plenty of money, more money than all of us.” Herzl proposed a modern Jerusalem, but the Kaiser then ended the meeting, saying “neither yes nor no.”
Ironically, both the Kaiser and Herzl loathed Jerusalem: “a dismal arid heap of stones,” wrote Wilhelm, “spoilt by large quite modern suburbs formed by Jewish colonies. Sixty thousand of these people are there, greasy and squalid, cringing and abject, doing nothing but trying to fleece their neighbours for every farthing—Shylocks by the score.”c But he wrote to his cousin, Russian Emperor Nicholas II, that he despised the “fetish adoration” of the Christians even more—“in leaving the Holy City I felt profoundly ashamed before the Muslims.” Herzl almost agreed: “When I remember you in days to come, O Jerusalem, it won’t be with delight. The musty deposits of 2,000 years of inhumanity, intolerance and foulness lie in your reeking alleys.” The Western Wall, he thought, was pervaded by “hideous, miserable, scrambling beggary.”
Instead Herzl dreamed that “if Jerusalem is ever ours, I’d clear up everything not sacred, tear down the filthy ratholes,” preserving the Old City as a heritage site like Lourdes or Mecca. “I’d build an airy comfortable properly sewered, brand new city around the Holy Places.” Herzl later decided that Jerusalem should be shared: “We shall extra-territorialize Jerusalem so that it will belong to nobody and everybody, its Holy Places the joint possession of all Believers.”
As the Kaiser departed down the road to Damascus, where he declared himself the protector of Islam and endowed Saladin with a new tomb, Herzl saw the future in three burly Jewish porters in kaftans: “If we can bring here 300,000 Jews like them, all of Israel will be ours.”
Yet Jerusalem was already very much the Jewish centre in Palestine: out of 45,300 inhabitants, 28,000 were now Jewish, a rise that was already worrying the Arab leadership. “Who can contest the rights of the Jews to Palestine?” old Yusuf Khalidi told his friend Zadok Kahn, Chief Rabbi of France, in 1899. “God knows, historically it is indeed your country” but “the brute force of reality” was that “Palestine is now an integral part of the Ottoman Empire and, what is more serious, it is inhabited by other than Israelites.” While the letter predates the idea of a Palestinian nation—Khalidi was a Jerusalemite, an Arab, an Ottoman and ultimately a citizen of the world—and the necessity to deny the Jewish claim to Zion, he foresaw that Jewish return, ancient and legitimate as it was, would clash with the ancient and legitimate presence of the Arabs.
In April 1903, the Kishinev pogrom, backed by the tsar’s interior minister Viacheslav von Plehve, launched a spree of anti-Semitic slaughter and terror across Russia.d In panic, Herzl travelled to St. Petersburg to negotiate with Plehve himself, the ultimate anti-Semite, but, getting nowhere with the Kaiser and the sultan, he started to look for a provisional territory outside the Holy Land.
Herzl needed a new backer: he proposed a Jewish homeland either in Cyprus or around El Arish in Sinai, part of British Egypt, both of them locations close to Palestine. In 1903, Natty, the first Lord Rothschild, who had finally come round to Zionism, introduced Herzl to Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, who ruled out Cyprus but agreed to consider El Arish. Herzl hired a lawyer to draft a charter for the Jewish settlement. The lawyer was the forty-year-old Liberal politician David Lloyd George, whose decisions would later alter Jerusalem’s fate more than those of anyone since Saladin. The application was turned down, much to Herzl’s disappointment. Chamberlain and Prime Minister Arthur Balfour came up with another territory—they offered Uganda or rather part of Kenya as a Jewish homeland. Herzl, who was short of alternatives, provisionally accepted.2
Regardless of his failed attempts to win over emperors and sultans, Herzl’s Zionism had inspired the persecuted Jews of Russia, particularly a boy in a well-off lawyer’s family in Pło´nsk. The eleven-year-old David Grün thought Herzl was the Messiah who would lead the Jews back to Israel.
a Jerusalem’s so-called Polish Jews were mainly Hasidim from the Russian empire but some of their sects were opposed to Zionism, believing it was sacrilege for mere men to decide God’s timing for the Return and Judgement Day.
b Wilhelm’s unpredictable behaviour frequently alarmed his own entourage. His early sex life with its outré tastes, including glove-wearing and sado-masochistic fetishes, had to be concealed. One courtier, a middle-aged Prussian general, died of a heart attack while dancing for the Kaiser in nothing but a tutu and feather-boa, and another entertained him dressed as a begging poodle “in shaved tights with, under a real poodle-tail, a marked rectal opening. I can already see His Majesty laughing with us.” Ultimately his friend Eulenburg was destroyed in a sex scandal when his secret gay life was exposed. Yet Wilhelm was also a priggish Victorian when it came to the morals of others: he never spoke to Eulenburg again.
c The Kaiser’s Teutonic gigantism changed the modern Jerusalem skyline. His Augusta Victoria Hospice, a German medieval fortress with a hideous tower so high that it was visible from the Jordan, dominated the Mount of Olives, and his Catholic Dormition Church, on Mount Zion, modelled outside on Worms Cathedral and inside on Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen, had “massive towers more suited to the Rhine Valley.”
d It was around this time that one of the tsar’s top secret policemen, the Okhrana director in Paris, Piotr Rachkovsky, ordered the forging of a book claiming to be a secret record of Herzl’s Congress in Basle in 1897: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was adapted (and much of it lifted directly) from an 1864 French satire against Emperor Napoleon III and an 1868 anti-Semitic German novel by Hermann Goedsche. The Protocols was a preposterous though diabolical plan for Jews to infiltrate governments, churches and the media and incite wars and revolution, in order to create a world empire ruled by a Davidic autocrat. Published in 1903, it was designed to provoke anti-Semitism within Russia where tsardom was threatened by Jewish revolutionaries.
CHAPTER 43
The Oud-Player of Jerusalem
1905–1914
DAVID GRÜN BECOMES DAVID BEN-GURION
David Grün’s father was already a local leader of the Lovers of Zion, forerunner of the Zionist movement, and a keen Hebraist, so the boy was taught Hebrew from an early age. But David, like many other Zionists, was shocked when he read that Herzl had accepted the Ugandan offer. At the Sixth Zionist Congress, Herzl tried to sell his so-called Ugandaism but he succeeded only in splitting his movement. His rival, the English playwright Israel Zangwill, coiner of the phrase “melting pot” to describe the assimilation of immigrants in America, decamped to found his Jewish Territorialist Organization and pursue an array of quixotic non-Palestinian Zions. The Austrian plutocrat Baron Maurice de Hirsch was financing Jewish colonies in Argentina, and the New York financier Jacob Schiff was promoting the Galveston Plan, a Lone Star Zion for Russian Jews in Texas. There was more support for El Arish because it was close to Palestine and Zionism was nothing without Zion, but none of these schemesa flourished and Herzl, exhausted by his peripatetic travels, died soon afterwards, aged just forty-four. He had successfully established Zionism as one of the solutions to the Jewish plight, particularly in Russia.
Young David Grün mourned his hero Herzl even though “we concluded the most effective way to combat Ugandaism was by settling in the Land of Israel.” In 1905, Emperor Nicholas II faced a revolution that almost cost him the throne. Many of the revolutionaries were Jews—Leon Trotsky being the most prominent—yet they were actually internationalists who despised both race and religion. Nonetheless, Nicholas felt that the forged anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was coming true: “How prophetic!” he wrote. “This year 1905 had been truly dominated by the Jewish Elders.” Forced to accept a constitution, he tried to restore his damaged autocracy by encouraging anti-Semitic massacres by nationalistic revanchists nicknamed the Black Hundreds.
The pogroms encouraged David Grün, a member of the socialist party Poalei Zion—Workers of Zion—to board one of the pilgrim ships from Odessa and set out for the Holy Land. The boy from Pło´nsk was typical of the Second Aliyah, a wave of secular pioneers, many of them socialist, who regarded Jerusalem as a nest of medieval superstition. In 1909, these settlers founded Tel Aviv on the sand dunes next to the ancient port of Jaffa; in 1911, they created a new collective farm—the first kibbutz—in the north.
Grün did not visit Jerusalem for many months after his arrival; instead he worked in the fields of Galilee, until, in mid-1910 the twenty-four-year-old moved to Jerusalem to write for a Zionist newspaper. Diminutive, skinny, curly-haired and always clad in a Russian rubashka smock to emphasize his socialist credentials, he adopted the nom de plume “Ben-Gurion,” borrowed from one of Simon bar Kochba’s lieutenants. The old shirt and the new name revealed the two sides of the emerging Zionist leader.
Ben-Gurion believed, like most of his fellow Zionists at this time, that a socialist Jewish state would be created without violence and without dominating or displacing the Palestinian Arabs; rather it would exist alongside them. He was sure that the Jewish and Arab working classes would cooperate. After all, the Ottoman vilayets of Sidon and Damascus and the sanjak of Jerusalem—as Palestine was then known—were poverty-stricken backwaters, sparsely populated by the 600,000 Arabs. There was much space to be developed. The Zionists hoped the Arabs would share the economic benefits of Jewish immigration. But there was little mixing between the two and it did not occur to the Zionists that most of these Arabs had no wish for the benefits of their settlement.
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